Top 5 Bandwidth Saving Tips for Websites
27 Mar 2012 | No Comments | posted by | in Website Optimization
Bandwidth is the amount of data used by the website to deliver itself to visitors on the web. Hosting companies prescribes the bandwidth according to the plan they offer. Assume you have a webpage of 20 KB in size. When a person looks at it, your website losses 20 KB of bandwidth from the total allocated size, this is what the exact example for the usage of bandwidth. When a person purchases a web hosting service, he also gets specific amount of bandwidth allocated by the hosting company and usually the bandwidth is calculated for the period of a month and in the form of GB (Giga Byte). One must thoroughly review the plans and bandwidth allocation before buying the hosting plan. It is always a good habit to choose a high amount of bandwidth plan that suits your website needs therefore bandwidth is surely an important factor that needs to be concentrated both when designing your website and also when selecting hosting service.
Compress ImagesOne can easily save the bandwidth cost by simply modifying the website and using some external resources available on the internet. Here we have discussed the top 5 website bandwidth saving tricks which are really helpful to cut off your bandwidth costs.
Compressing images before hosting is the best way to save bandwidth as images acquire the major segment of bandwidth. You can either do it in Photoshop or by using many free services available on the web. In Photoshop you can choose “Save for Web & Devices” option from the file menu to optimize it for lower bandwidth. You can also do it by using free online services such as smushit powered by Yahoo! Or jpegmini . Hosting the optimized PNG or JPEG files not only save the bandwidth but also makes the website load faster.
Trim HTML and CSS Files
Trimming the HTML and CSS files can save lots of bandwidth. You can take the help of GZip to compress HTML files and can use http://tools.arantius.com/css-compressor to compress your CSS files. You can use CSS generated gradient background to avoid using image in its place which are bandwith consuming. Using the less tables while building your website also saves the bandwidth where you can use DIVs.
Use External File Sharing Websites
If you are a developer and selling the apps or screen-savers through your website then you might have definitely stored the apps in your web space itself. But this stands as the major blunder which results in losing high amount bandwidth as applications are big in size. Instead you can use free file hosting sites such as RapidShare or MediaFire. You can just host the file to these and keep the download link on your own blog or website.
Disable Hotlinks
Disabling the hotlinks is the best solution to avoid “bandwidth theft”. Hotlink is term used when other website links an image or file that is hosted on your site. One can avoid hotlink by modifying the .htaccess file or utilize DMCA law against the website which utilizes your work. After modifying .htaccess you can check the hotlink protection status on your web site at www.altlab.com/hotlinking.html.
Use HTML 5 Animation Instead of Flash
You can cut down your bandwidth consumption by simply converting your Flash animations or banners to HTML5 animations. There are many free tools such as Swiffy and Wallaby are available on the internet which allows you to convert your Flash animation to HTML 5 for free.
